hone message. I
watched him read it, and saw the sudden pallor of his face, and noticed
how the room shook with the constant reverberation of distant gun-fire.
A big bombardment was in progress over Vimy way.

"Excuse me," said the colonel; "things seem to be happening. I must go
at once."

He went through the window, leaping the sill, and a look of bad tidings
went with him.

His men had been blown out of the craters.

A staff officer sat in the brigade office, and when the acting-brigadier
had gone raised his head and looked across to me.

"I am a critic of these affairs," he said. "They seem to me too
expensive. But I'm here to do what I am told."

We did not regain the Vimy craters until a year afterward, when the
Canadians and Scottish captured all the Vimy Ridge in a great assault.

XX

The winter of discontent had passed. Summer had come with a wealth of
beauty in the fields of France this side the belt of blasted earth. The
grass was a tapestry of flowers, and tits and warblers and the golden
oriole were making music in the woods. At dusk the nightingale sang as
though no war were near its love, and at broad noonday a million larks
rose above the tall wheat with a great high chorus of glad notes.

Among the British armies there was hope again, immense faith that
believed once more in an ending to the war. Verdun had been saved. The
enemy had been slaughtered. His reserves were thin and hard to get (so
said Intelligence) and the British, stronger than they had ever been, in
men, and guns, and shells, and aircraft, and all material of war, were
going to be launched in a great offensive. No more trench warfare.
No more dying in ditches. Out into the open, with an Army of Pursuit
(Rawlinson's) and a quick break-through. It was to be "The Great Push."
The last battles were to be fought before the year died again, though
many men would die before that time.

Up in the salient something happened to make men question the weakness
of the enemy, but the news did not spread very far and there was a lot
to do elsewhere, on the Somme, where the salient seemed a long way off.
It was the Canadians to whom it happened, and it was an ugly thing.

On June 2d a flame of fire from many batteries opened upon their lines
in Sanctuary Wood and Maple Copse, beyond the lines of Ypres, and
tragedy befell them. I went to see those who lived through it and stood
in the presence of men who had escaped from the very